Letters to the Editor
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My challenge to Alice
and all the other people who drone on and on about eating organic food.
Go a week only eating inorganics. Or better yet, go 3 days eating only organics.
Last I checked, if you can eat it and extract energy from it... IT'S ORGANIC!
And if it's H2O, NaCl, CaCl, etc... IT'S INORGANIC!
So personally, I like to consume a nice mixture of organic and inorganic compounds in my diet. But thanks for polluting the scientific vocabulary with your hippy dippy definitions.
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I believe in everything in moderation, including this kind of food
Alice Waters has some nice ideas. It would be good if we ate more good food at the height of its freshness. It would be good if we used more local food, more humanely-raised food, more food directly from farmers we could meet. Of course, there is no locally-produced pepper or cinnamon and, sorry Alice, I'm not prepared to take them out of my diet for the rest of my life, or until I made a journey to the far east.
Nor do her suggestions meet Kant's universal imperative. The planet actually cannot support five billion people eating just as Alice Waters wants. The U.S. can't support 300 million people doing it. There isn't land for farmers markets for all us all to buy at, there aren't enough farmers who want to spend their time marketing directly to individuals, there isn't enough land for truck gardening.
And if we were all to slow down our lives and work to her drummer, no one would be able to afford the $65-85 that dinner costs at Chez Panisse.
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Feeling Pretty Blessed Right About Now
Priviledged to be living in So Cal where everything grows all the time...sort of. I have a weekly Farmer's market available to me just 7 miles away, and 2 more within 20 miles. But I get my veggies from a local CSA (community supported agriculture) farm. For $100 a month, I get a decent sized box of veggies to eat once a week, which I split with my neighbors because it's too much for my daughter and I.
I had forgotten tomatoes could taste so good, and I am hopelessly in love with arugula! I am just beginning to get a sense of what the growing seasons are for certain things, having belonged to the CSA farm for about 7 months now.
I have learned how to make collards edible, and the pure ecstatic bliss of fresh, out-of-the-ground-that-morning carrots, juiced - heaven! I love the swiss chard and even the russian kale but have yet to make real peace with the fennel; I give that to my neighbors. A few times a year the farm hosts a pot luck, and everyone comes with their own version of what they do with their veggies - invariably a feast.
This has vastly improved my diet, my energy level, and my community. Sure, there are weeks when a lot of those fine veggies end up on the compost heap and I eat fast food a couple of nights because I don't have the energy to cook. But the nights I do cook just feel better all around. The food feels connected to the earth. There is nothing that smells quite so "green" as a box of veggies picked that morning - it reeks of chlorophyll. It also feels connected to the people who work the farm and take good care of those veggies before they end up in a box in my kitchen...they have an entirely different language I am just beginning to learn ("Nitrates? Bring 'em on!). They have weeding parties that I have a moderate amount of guilt I have thus far not attended. I'll get there eventually.
All in all, I have never eaten so well. Increasingly I am quite dissatisfied with most things I find in the supermarket.
Feeling Blessed in So Cal....
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Alice Bugs Me
The thing that bugs me most about Alice Waters is that she stole her whole "eat and buy locally" thing from Europeans (Italy, France, Turkey, Greece, etc.). Italian-Americans and Italians have been doing this for centuries, and suddenly, she's a celebrity chef and millionaire food guru for suggesting the idea. Big deal. Never mind that you could eat three better meals in Italy--even with the low dollar--for the price of one meal at a Waters restaurant. It's the American ruse dressed up in organic. Pisses me off.
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Alice is a voice for the hope of preserving real food.
Not all that many years ago we all grew or knew where our food came from, this was true for me as a child, and is still true for me.
Now, the food industry defines what food is, how we consume it and the truth is they do a horrid job. As a dieitian and a foodie, I can honestly tell you most processed food tastes like nothing, and most Americans health has paid a huge price for the industy domination of food. Consider 25% of all children are overweight, 15% extremely, why? Because processed foods do not satisfy your hunger, so you keep eating. The incidence of diabetes and heart disease, hypertension and cancer are all related to this corporate processing of our diets. What could be more important than families sharing the process of growing, cooking and planning their diets? Playing video games while microwaving a frozen peanutbutter and jelly sandwich? Is it any wonder people can hardly cook any more? (heat and eat is not cooking...)
Alice is a voice of reason in the insane way food has nearly been destroyed in our culture, I have so much respect for the work that she does and I have a great deal of hope that if people will try the principle of respecting what and where their food comes from they will awaken their tastes to the
intentions of what eating really is about, nourishing the body and the soul. Few things in life give contentment like a well prepared meal shared with ones you love. Happy Thanksgiving...for all I wish this possible.
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Alice the Brillant-leprechaun to me: gads, and Rumi-Breadmaker, Allie, and good 'ole Durian Joe's wife is Ms Lady Lucky. etc.,
A commercial egg is watery.
Place a grass fed egg next to a good hen with good healthy 'ovaries' and see.
Two backyard hen-egg-delivery service to your home-bowl will be the all-happy-morning sunshine smile start to a day. A bought Wall-Mart egg will flop. The yoke from a local Farm-egg merchant will stand tall.
Did you ever see two eyeballs are smiling back after ya's cracked two egg shells.
A two bright-eyed, orange-eyed-gal, the dear hen who clucked to supply a feast is better than gold nugget and please thank her for the two-golk yokes!
It is a b-fast that has a texture. The food is not like Florida Orange juice! But that's okay. Jusy wash the cooked eggs down with tea? okay.
The eggs seem to say: "You can eat me raw, fried, poached, scrambled, or chop some komatina (sp?) greens into my whites." Or, "Why don't you just hard boil my yokes and save the whites to glaze a loaf of bread."
Now that is a idea to gently beat the loaf's brown crust with a poky-stick, and do it gently.
Yesterday, my son, daughter-in-law, who's mother was a farmers daughter btw, and my grandaughter too, did a big-city farmers-market. I was supposed to baby sit. That's my favorite farm chore. I hung around this ole place to long...and missed the wagon cart...I was cranky as a red hen.
I was gonna almost kill a hen for Arne.
huh.
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Chopping food is more fun than teevee. Play, 'The Three Violins' and watch the latest learned ballet steps? I'm sure Alice is aware of Lappe's 'More with Less' cookbook. There is anything more fun than slicing colorful peppers? Serious.
Thanks for the article. I'd pawn my computer at the White House Pawn ReThug Store and go ReTurn to Full-Time doing what your advocating, Alice (tanks Anonymous) Leprechaun.
Institutions, sad to say (schools, V.A.), buy the cheaper auctioned-off warehouse food. I've looked into it with the V.A.. A bumper-glut auction house depot in Florida, Pa, or California (and the West coast does fly lettuce to DC with COD delivery from a UPS air service) etc., may employ those good "illegal" brown skin...(salt of the earth) human harvesters...the beautiful 'bringer in of the 'golden' nutritious greens...
Well, I felt like reading the article was like a meal at DC's Nora's.
I've sold lettuce to her beautful (Nora buys only organic) chefs before. She ask me to raise bunnies. I tell her if she was a bunny, how ya'd like to be caged and fed bunny pellets? huh. And then end up on a Nora's dinner plate? Honest. I love the promotion of PURE treats that have not been robbed of the original vital essence within.
iPhone? huh? I still can't figure out how to use the cell phone.
I hide.
Why carry a phone?
Wendell Berry would agree with Brillant Savarin. A nation needs healthy citizens. If we eat plastic wrap, we become politico people who are pre-maturely wrapped in a black zipped lock morgue bag.
It's just that the fancy 'thread' politicians wear-garb-mask.
The politico's are a bit too close to calling 9/11? I say: O, eh. ah.
"Howdy, mortician?" Yea. "Stop bye."
The mortician, according to M. de' M.
sad to say, was called to stuff a last red radish- y'ass know where? I ain't telling nobody. Who wants to buy a used computer?
I'll trade for two red-ear mules or two-orange eyed tomatoe pickers. egg- page me- okay, by tossing a rotten tater at me.
P.S. To eat in silence? That's the best if ya's cranky.